Rachel Maxi shines on

I love Rachel Maxi. She paints in oils, in her basement and sometimes on the kitchen table, modest scenes of an astringent tenderness. Here’s a street you can hold in your hand, green pooling in the pavement cracks, built-in steps almost worn away to shadows and the meticulous white of the light.

Here’s Interstate 5, heading north in Seattle. If the freeway looked like this, we’d stop to stare and never get where we were going. She took a real place and redeemed it in this world and no other.

She has no gallery, at least not right now, so “Dumpsters and Dirt Piles” is at a hair salon through Oct. 27: Halo, 1919 3rd Ave. Also, there are a few new paintings (including the ones reproduced here) at SAM Rental Sales Gallery, Third and University streets.

Over at Aesthetic Grounds, Glenn Weiss says he plans to use the term “art culture” in place of “art world” from now on, and I know what he means. Art culture includes people such as Maxi, and art world doesn’t seem to, not really. The art world runs on money, necessarily so. Artists have to eat. So do dealers. Art culture runs on art. When money comes up, it isn’t as the ultimate measure of value.

Richard Lacayo (Looking Around) doesn’t need to change words to get the same point across:

And though it’s impossible to write about art without sometimes getting into the topic of the art market, I’m not much interested in who bought what last night for how much. Whatever a work of art may be worth, its dollar value will always be the last way to know.

His blog is great, and it’s at Time. Who’d have thunk? Culturally, Time is a shadow of itself. But just when a sign lights up in my head saying, about Time, abandon hope, ye who enter here, along comes Lacayo’s blog. Never give up and always be closing.